Sally Rooney: Queen of the Millennial Novel?

Rooney’s New Novel, INTERMEZZO; Anti-Israel Feelings; Marxism

Rooney NYT Interview 10/2024

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The Author

This is going to be a controversial essay for one simple reason: I’m supposed to pick sides.

For those of you who don’t know who Sally Rooney is: Here’s the very basic scoop. She’s 33, Irish (from Castlebar, County Mayo in Northwest Ireland), has published four novels, including Normal People and the brand-new 2024 novel Intermezzo, is an avowed Marxist, identifies as a feminist, has become increasingly famous (at least within the literary world), and has, to varying degrees since the fall of 2021 (and more so recently) criticized Israel in their treatment of Palestinians even going so far as to join the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement and disallow Israeli publishers from releasing her work or translating her books into Hebrew.

Because of this, I’m supposed to hate her, reject her out of hand, and certainly never buy or read her work. Especially me, of all people, right, given all my ranting about progressive extremism over the past few years?

But here’s the thing: I’m an independent, contrarian free-thinker. I loathe both political sides at this point. I may be “anti-Woke” but I’m just as much “anti-ANTI-Woke.” Extremism and polarity and superlatives tend to suck all the air out of the room. Extremism leaves no room for the nuanced messy humanness which is where all of us actually live.

I also strongly believe in the sacredness of separating the art from the artist. Yes, even when it comes to boycotting Israel, refusing to allow Israeli publishers to release her work, not allowing her books to be translated into Hebrew, calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a “genocide.”

Knut Hamsun was a brilliant author (he wrote Hunger and Growth of the Soil); Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature: He was also a Nazi supporter and met personally with Hitler, proclaiming the man a hero and savior. John Steinbeck was brilliant; I loved East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath and many more of his books: He also was a huge, passionate supporter of the Vietnam War. Celine (who’s profound World War I novel I read during COVID, Journey to the End of the Night) was a rabid antisemite. Norman Mailer was, when younger, an angry, alcoholic, violent socialist-Marxist who stabbed his wife, Adele, in 1960. Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Kerouac and many others had their bad moments with women. Hell, if you want to really get down to it: Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, owned slaves.

Yet all of these authors were brilliant and absolutely required reading.

Seems silly to me, more human than sexist

Too choppy for me

Wouldn’t I be the wormiest of hypocrites if I said, Well, I know I defended all those 20^th century male authors, defending their rights as artists, using the ‘separation of art and artist’ framework, but, you know, it doesn’t really apply to contemporary women authors who I politically disagree with?

Yes. I would.

As many of you know I have been very vocally pro-Israel. Read my essay on this here. I’ve also been vocally against identity politics of any kind, from either/any side. And I’ve been highly critical of Democrats the past decade. (I also hate Trump and think the Republican Party has largely become an absurdist joke.)

Without hesitation I will say that I strongly disagree with Rooney when it comes to her stance on Israel, the BDS movement, refusing Israeli publishers from putting her work out, blocking Hebrew translations. I have no doubt people in Israel feel this as a literary and cultural slap to the face, and I don’t blame them.

And yet: When it comes to an artist’s work I want to be able to stand above all of that and freely judge the work by its own merits. I knew about the buzz around Rooney and her career and her books. Around 2021 I read Normal People and was not much impressed. That book had received a lot of industry attention and, somewhat similar to my take on Emma Cline’s The Girls in 2016, I thought it was overhyped. (Cline’s book was better.) Normal People was a decent novel but it didn’t feel in any way revelatory or incandescent to me. I also saw Rooney speak at McNally-Jackson Books on Prince Street in SoHo, NYC, circa 2017. I found her comments on Marxism at the time to be, to say the least, immature and unformed.

Honestly, I wasn’t even planning on buying Sally Rooney. As a combination Christmas/Birthday gift I’d received $200 in gift cards for Portland’s wonderful Powell’s Books. So, one day I walked into the Powell’s on Hawthorne with the intention of buying Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which I’d been listening to on Audible and been so fascinated by that I wanted a physical copy because I wanted to highlight, write marginalia and screenshot quotes for Substack Notes.

But, when I walked in I saw Rooney’s bright yellow chessboard cover, SALLY ROONEY in thick black at the top, INTERMEZZO in same at the bottom, I had a realization which has been brewing inside me for a while now: I don’t read enough women writers. More than that: Generally speaking, I don’t read enough contemporary writers, period.

Too often I’ve been slightly stuck in my own ignorance on this score because of my dislike of Wokeism, my dislike of Fourth-Wave Feminism (being often highly anti-men) and my dislike of the handful of contemporary novels I’ve read over the past decade. There were exceptions: Anything by Zadie Smith I loved. Everything by Ottessa Moshfegh; read my recent essay on her 2022 novel LAPVONA here. Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter I liked. Emma Cline’s The Girls.

But mostly I’ve always generally read 19^th and 20^th century classics by dead white men, as the youngsters say now. Dostoevsky. Tolstoy. Nabokov. Roth. Bellow. Hemingway. Miller. Bukowski. Mailer. Etc. You get the idea. It has always felt to me like writers before say the 1970s—when a lot of people still read books, New York was still the mecca of publishing, dissenting opinions and views were allowed and normal, and artists could say more or less whatever the hell they wanted—were the “real writers.” They weren’t inhibited by strict social structures from above and below telling them to pick a side or have fill-in-the-blank ideology. Actually, that’s not true: They were told this but it was okay if they rejected it. It was a time when art was pure. One could be an artist without an agenda.

I still think in many ways that this is true; that writers of 50, 100 years ago were much more “authentic” in many ways, living in a time before radical politics exerted such forceful pressure, before iPhones and social media had both connected and disconnected us all so powerfully on a global level, before the intense conformism of Millennials and Gen Z produced generations of kids who couldn’t think independently or focus on something for more than five minutes at a time.

And yet.

I bought Intermezzo, I confess, as what I called a “hate-read.” Just buying a book by a contemporary author as liked and famous as her was in and of itself enough for me to mock and loathe her. Add to that her “Marxist” beliefs, and then her anti-Israel views and, well, you can see where I’m going. I fully expected to find a book chock-full of identity politics, flattened 2-D characters, wokeism-galore, bad dialogue, weak MFA program fiction, etc.

But that is not what I found. Not by a country mile.

Power dynamics

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The Book

Intermezzo means basically an intermission of sorts. A light instrumental between acts of a play, or a short musical movement introduced between sections in an opera, etc. A go-between, as it were, between two parts of a play, dramatic work, opera, etc.

The novel follows two brothers, Ivan (22) and Peter (32). They are not close but once were when much younger. Peter is a hardworking “rich” attorney (and leftist) and Ivan is a chess-master who does data-analysis on the side and lightly explores the outer circles of anti-feminist incel worlds.

But the book is, more than anything else, the story of these two brothers and how they find themselves back in each other’s lives.

Rooney loves exploring power dynamics. And she loves nuanced complications added to those dynamics. Ivan falls in love with an older woman who’s 36. Peter falls for a 23-year-old who starts out as his “sugar-baby.” (She sleeps with him and he covers her financially. The classic “sugar-daddy.”)

The question on both sides becomes: Who exactly is using who? Who has power over whom? Rooney, delightfully, as any good novelist does, doesn’t attempt to answer this question. Instead, she poses subtle and profound questions. Perhaps the 36-year-old woman, Margaret, is taking advantage of the pure, innocent, naïve 22-year-old Ivan? Or, is the 22-year-old Ivan in a sense taking advantage of the wounded, broken emotional neediness and lostness of the older woman? With Peter: Do we have an older man taking advantage of a younger woman? Or, does this younger woman (Naomi) know exactly what she’s doing and, by using sex and her body, is she taking the older man for a ride, using him for a place to crash and money in her account while pretending to love him?

Or maybe it’s all of the above, simultaneously?

You have to ultimately draw your own conclusions here. And perhaps there aren’t any easy, binary answers. One thing is crystal clear to me, though, after reading the 450-page book: Her characters are deeply drawn, three-dimensional, rich, with true depth and scale and authenticity. I could see pieces of myself in all her characters, but if I’m being honest I see myself most in the arrogant, intelligent, witty Peter, the man terrified of love, afraid of vulnerability, obsessed with being perceived a certain way. (At least my old pre-sober self. Now I suppose I’m more of a mix of Ivan, Peter and Margaret.)